“Books are a load of crap.”

This is the conclusion of Philip Larkin’s ‘A Study of Reading Habits’. In this poem, a disillusioned reader recounts how literature has let him down. Nowadays he prefers to get drunk. In three short stanzas, he describes a lifetime of searching and changing tastes and, in the process, deftly parodies various kinds of literature: action and adventure stories, pornography, and earnest realism. As Andrew Motion has observed, literature had offered a way “to fool the sexually insecure reader into thinking he was adventurous and successful [...] Now, jaded by failure in the real world, he can see in books only the reflection of his own incompetence”(299). The joke, it seems, is on the hapless reader. Continue reading →